boorish behaviour is on the rise in American sport – The Irish Times

Twenty-nine years have passed since Charlie Sheen purchased 2,615 tickets for the then California Angels versus the Detroit Tigers at Anaheim Stadium.

Commandeering a swathe of seats in left field for himself, he had forked over around $7,000 in the hope of catching a home run ball. Sheen and three of his best pals sat there in splendid isolation all night just in case somebody dispatched a pitch over the wall in their general direction.

Asked why he splurged that much money on the off chance of snagging a memento, he explained: “I didn’t want to crawl over the paying public. I wanted to avoid the violence.”

Sheen came to mind last Friday night when the Philadelphia Phillies’ Harrison Bader unfurled a homer into the left field seats against the Miami Marlins at LoanDepot Park.

Half a dozen excited patrons frantically tracked the trajectory of the hit and moved swiftly through the bleachers in the hope of grabbing hold of it.

Drew Feltwell won that lottery, snaffling the ball and then walking back to his delighted kids. As any father might, he thrust the prize into the glove of his nine-year-old son, Lincoln, before sitting down triumphant. He had just fulfilled the dream of every baseball fan who ever bought a ticket to the show.

His glory was short-lived. A grey-haired woman in a Phillies’ shirt stomped over to the family and berated the father for what she regarded as the theft of something that was rightfully hers. An assertion based on the reasoning the ball initially landed closer to her seat as it bobbled around than his.

[ The Ozzy Osbourne song heard in US sport arenas for nearly half a centuryOpens in new window ]

With camera phones recording their confrontation, as is the way in the modern world, and his kids listening to her harangue him, Feltwell chose to hand over the ball to make her stop. By the time she traipsed away with it in her possession, the incident had been shown live on television, was quickly going viral, and the woman involved had already been christened “Phillies Karen”.

The third such unsavoury showdown at a sporting event in just over a week. As fans milled around Kamil Majchrzak following his surprise second round victory over Karen Khachanov at the US Open, the unseeded Pole was handing an autographed cap to a boy when it was snatched away by a grown man.

Internet sleuths quickly and inevitably did their thing, identified the culprit as a Polish CEO named Piotr Szczerek and subjected him to reams of abuse. The hatred intensified when it emerged he was a millionaire. In the face of these attacks, Szczerek subsequently apologised profusely for his callous disregard and promised to hand the headwear to the child he’d deprived of the initial thrill.

Just 24 hours after that incident, there was another contretemps in the stands at Citi Field, right next door to the tennis in Flushing.

As the New York Mets entertained the Marlins, an older man went to collect a Xavier Edwards’ foul ball that dropped conveniently in the aisle near where he was sitting. As he went to pick it up, he was jostled by a younger chap with a beard who then swiped it from his grasp and strode back to his seat refusing all entreaties about rightful ownership. “Guys fighting over the ball,” tut-tutted Mets analyst and former player Keith Hernandez as the television cameras showed the incident, “come on now!”

Americans take the collection of sports memorabilia far too seriously for their own good. Baseball might be the only sport where adults turn up to watch professional teams play while wearing their childhood first baseman’s glove in case they need to catch a fly ball with one hand while cradling a beer with the other.

The desire to bring home a piece of the action causes normally sane individuals to temporarily lose their minds and act like buffoons any time a ball veers into their orbit. Time was when it was taken for granted a grown-up who caught one would immediately hand it to the nearest child. Not anymore. Basic fan etiquette one more casualty of these woebegone times.

The people involved in these incidents made very public fools of themselves. But in the age of social media, online mob is always lurking to prolong their ordeals, waiting to pounce and vilify. The quest to identify “Phillies Karen” or “Cruella da Phil”, as some called her, was carried out with feverish intensity. There seemed to be an overwhelming determination to doxx her as if she was one of those awful characters now regularly caught on camera spouting racial abuse. She was merely caught on camera being classless, footage of her tantrum seen by millions. How much more should she suffer though?

There’s a valuable lesson here too in that the true winners on the night were the Feltwells. Having seen what played out on the big screen, the Marlins’ staff responded immediately, dispatching somebody to the stands to hand two enormous goodie bags to Lincoln and his sister. The Phillies were equally conscientious. Organising for the family to be brought down to the visitors’ locker room area after the game to meet Harrison Bader, he then gave them a signed bat. Now there’s talk of them receiving free World Series tickets. Both clubs handled themselves with class and dignity. Increasingly rare commodities among too many fans watching American sport.

Click here to read article